Televisions were once considered a luxury item, and evolved to a mainstream home appliance such as a refrigerator or stove, and now often occupy multiple rooms in the average home, as well as multiple portable devices suitable for viewing. As televisions (TVs) and associated viewing offerings. The advent of viewer controlled, rather than broadcaster controlled, viewing options introduced by VCRs (Video Cassette Recorders), DVDs, and most recently on-demand and streaming downloads also fueled a market of so-called “Home Theatre” systems. Home theater systems have evolved from simple monaural (mono) add-on speakers, to multi-channel surround sound, to single box virtual surround sound systems. Vendors of home electronics and home theatre components often employ particular encoding schemes to manipulate and direct sound information for achieving “theatre-like” sound in a home environment. Conventional systems generally rely on a “surround sound” encoded audio signal for retrieval of audio information, such as the well-known DOLBY® approaches (2.0 and 5.1 being the most prominent), and endorsed by most producers/vendors of distributed media. Sound encoding separates an audio signal or stream into multiple channels for rendering on different speakers and/or for different ranges of sound, e.g. subwoofer. Many of these conventional systems simply utilize the signal levels as they are encoded, ignoring the fact that the respective levels of these audio channels may be detrimental to reproduction of spoken voice, especially for the hearing impaired, without “riding” the volume control through constant adjustment to compensate for voice inconsistency.